Cloud Sidekick, creator of the open source Cato Cloud Orchestration Platform, has announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE), which extends the open source Community Edition (CE) by adding Storm Deployment Automation and support for High Availability management server configurations.

Storm is a new declarative provisioning feature that enables cloud developers and operations staff to create AWS CloudFormation-compatible deployment configurations that can be deployed into Eucalyptus private clouds as easily as the AWS EC2 public cloud. Cato EE also enables a high availability architecture for increased management server scalability and fault tolerance.

The Cato Cloud Orchestration Platform is the culmination of more than 10 years of development work managing application lifecycles in complex, distributed data center environments such as T-Mobile USA. According to Cloud Sidekick, Cato delivers a proven, cost-effective and open source alternative to manage deployment and operations for public cloud, private cloud and data center resources with fully on-premise cloud management servers.

"Cato was architected to help DevOps teams cost-effectively automate and orchestrate best of breed configuration management, runtime automation and monitoring solutions to manage cloud applications without requiring additional agents on the managed servers," said Dennis Ehle, CEO of Cloud Sidekick.

With Cato Enterprise Edition, customers can now choose their preferred configuration management tool like Chef or Puppet and their preferred monitoring tool like Zabbix or Zenoss, and orchestrate them from the Cato platform. Just as within AWS deployments, managing private cloud deployment automation with CloudFormation compatible Ecosystem Templates allows for simplified, modular instance configurations, as the configuration management tools no longer need to address multi-server orchestration.

Eucalyptus and Cloud Sidekick are hosting a webinar on Thursday, May 31st to demonstrate a single CloudFormation template being used to provision and configure the same multi-tier application on both AWS public and Eucalyptus private clouds.